The Canary Flies Again It's Small, Stubby And Yield Yellow. The Piper Cub Is More Like A Vw Beetle Than A B-1 Bomber. But The Cub Is Ushering In A New Era Of Aviation.

August 14, 1988|By Michael McLeod of the Sentinel Staff

Sleek, silver-jacketed forms perch in neat rows along the warehouse floor at the Piper Aircraft Manufacturing complex in Vero Beach, Fla. You can get a quick education on how airplanes are put together just by scanning the production line, seeing how the wingless hulls at one end give way in stages to the finished airplanes at the other -- painted, numbered, runway-ready.

With their pressurized cabins and computer-enhanced designs, some of the Piper models are state of the art. But turn a corner in the warehouse and it's as though 50 years of aircraft engineering just disappear.

There are half-finished fuselages all around here, too, but not the tapered silhouettes you see elsewhere in the building. These are squat yellow husks that look like old-fashioned taxi cabs with wings.

On one side of the warehouse, a skeletal wing straddles a table. A pale yellow fabric is partially stretched across the wing, like a sock drawn halfway onto a foot. In another corner is a crate of wooden wing sections. The whole place has the feel of an aircraft museum.

But it isn't. This, too, is a working assembly line. Mechanics in yellow baseball caps bend over the canopy of one of the fuselages, tugging at toggles and wires. Workers stretch the canary yellow fabric across the wings, pressing it down with what look like ordinary laundry-room irons. All the scene needs is for someone in goggles and a leather helmet to stride in and vault into one of the cockpits.

This is the reincarnation of the venerable Piper Cub -- considered the Model T of single-engine planes when it first appeared in the '30s. Piper is putting the Cub back into production after a lapse of 10 years, hoping the plane will help spur a resurgence of interest in personal flying.

It's a role the little plane is familiar with. With its lightweight construction and high-wing design, the original Piper Cub was so cheap, safe and easy to fly that it attracted a whole new class of pilots -- which is exactly what its developer, aviation pioneer William T. Piper, intended. Over the years, the plane became so popular that people began to use ''Piper Cub'' as a generic reference for any single-engine airplane.

The Cub is a classic. It puts lumps in aviators' throats the way a '56 Chevy makes car buffs mist over. But bringing the plane back into production is less nostalgic than practical -- Piper Aircraft is betting that there's still a market for a light, versatile, economical plane.

''I wish I could tell you why everybody gets so choked up about Piper Cubs,'' says Raymond Schaefer, an antique-plane buff who supervises Sentimental Journey, an annual fly-in of Cub owners to Lock Haven, Pa.

''There is an affection there that's extremely powerful. I can only tell you that if I had a nickel for every pilot who told me, 'I learned to fly in a Cub; I did my first solo in a Cub,' I'd be a rich man. It's just a beautiful little airplane. It just sits there and wants to fly.''

The Piper Cub's reincarnation is the idea of Stuart Millar, a char is matic, 62-year-old California businessman and aviation buff who bought Piper Aircraft last year, hoping to save it from a decade of economic doldrums and corporate infighting. One of his first projects was getting the Cub back on the production line.

Like a lot of aviators, Millar learned to fly in a Piper Cub. Like a lot of aviators, he can tell you the month, the year and the date he first went up in one. Millar insists he's bringing the Cub back for practical reasons. But he also admits that the aircraft is a symbol of the company's revival, and his own broader crusade to inspire a modest renaissance of personal flying.

Right now, in the building filled with squat yellow fuselages, sentiment, crusades and symbols take second place to something far more compelling: a production deadline.

Getting the first Cub completed in time for a test flight and a cross- country trip to an air show in Oshkosh, Wis., is the job of production manager Wayne Giles. Giles is a shambling man with bushy eyebrows who saves time getting around the cavernous assembly building by coasting from place to place on a yellow bicycle. A Piper-yellow bicycle. It is a popular pigment around the Piper plant. There are yellow coffee cups, yellow T-shirts with ''The Cub Is Back'' printed on them, yellow clocks on the wall with the Piper mascot, a bear cub, on the face.

Three days away from his deadline for getting the first new Cub finished, Giles leans his bike against a workbench and leads the way along the Cub production line, a curious blend of the old and the new. Next to a recently tooled revolving metal frame for keeping Cub fuselages in place during assembly, there's an old wooden disc used for pressing Cub parts into place. The disc was found in storage in Piper's original plant in Lock Haven.